ES2015 features?

[Vladimir Sedach]

Hi John,

> I realise that pretty much all of these are just syntactic sugar, but I
> wanted to ask whether anyone other than me thinks it would be nice if
> Parenscript knew about these modern niceties and could be directed to
> generate them, and what the general roadmap (if any) is for Parenscript,
> before I start looking at what's involved.

Adding support for newer ECMAScript features in Parenscript output is
part of the plan. There is a variable *JS-TARGET-VERSION* that
controls the ECMAScript version the output will target. Peter
Stirling has already started work towards ECMAScript 2015:
https://github.com/vsedach/Parenscript/pull/39

The general road-map I have in mind is, first, to release Parenscript
2.7. I plan to make 2.7 the last 2.x Parenscript release.

After the release, the Parenscript code will become part of
Parenscript 3, which will have some incompatible changes: removal of
deprecated macros and special operators, and different system and
package names (to prevent conflicts between Parenscript 2.x and 3,
and to no longer define short two and four letter package names,
which conflict with people's package nicknames in their systems and
the REPL).

I also have a pile of ideas for improving the internals of the
Parenscript compiler, and improvements in the efficiency and
correctness (with respect to Common Lisp semantics) of the generated
Parenscript code, that are non-breaking changes.

The most significant change for Parenscript 3 will be the license:
Parenscript 3 will incorporate the 3 clause BSD licensed Parenscript
2 code into a copyleft (GPL version 3 or later) project. There are a
lot of reasons for this that I can go into in more detail, if anyone
is interested. The short explanation is that my experiences in the
past six years have very strongly convinced me that working on
non-copyleft Free Software is against my own (and the general
public's) interests. I have decided to re-license Free Software
projects that I created or maintain under the GPL.

Vladimir